NEW YORK, United States — The global fashion business is animated by the ideas, emotions and actions of a core community of influential insiders. So, who are the designers, executives, editors, fashion technologists, models, muses and other industry catalysts shaping fashion most powerfully today?

Since 2013, The Business of Fashion has been hand-curating a list of these power players. We announce the top 500 names, resulting in a community called the BoF 500, which grows each year as new names join our index. To create the list, we blend on-the-ground intelligence with hundreds of nominations from current and former members around the world. Today, BoF is proud to reveal the sixth annual #BoF500, presented in partnership with JHSF.

For this year’s list, we focused on change agents: those who are addressing fashion's most critical issues during a period of great flux and tumult within the industry and the wider world. The 2018 BoF 500 is more diverse than ever before with 96 new names and 63 nationalities representing every exciting facet of the $2.4 trillion fashion industry. Two of our four cover subjects of our special print edition — Kalpona Akter and Yara Shahidi — are brand new additions to the community.